In the blink of an eye, it was New Year's Eve again. The last time I celebrated New Year's Eve still felt like it had been the last time. Looking back on that previous New Year's Eve, it seemed as though it had happened just last year, which was truly poignant.
Panda wished all my fellow readers a prosperous Year of the Snake, a smooth Year of the Snake, a wealthy Year of the Snake, a healthy Year of the Snake, top honors in the Year of the Snake, and a happy family in the Year of the Snake. In short, may everything be snake-cellent!
The annual word-count-padding... no.
The annual year-end summary was here again!
This chapter contained no actual plot. Readers who weren't interested could skip straight to the next chapter.
The Scholar had now reached nearly 3.6 million words. It was the first time in my life I'd written such a long book. Overall, my feelings could be summed up in four words: pain and joy.
The pain was mainly due to my own lack of ability.
There were too many plotlines I wanted to write better, yet the results strayed far from what I'd intended. My writing ability and technique couldn't support them. As a novelist, my fundamentals were still too poor. The more I wrote, the more I could feel the weakness of my prose, the disorder of my pacing, the vagueness of my characters, and the stiffness of my plot. Whenever I looked back over it, even the punctuation seemed unpleasant.
There were too many fellow writers who could produce thousands of words at the drop of a hat. In this industry, writing 4,000 words an hour seemed to be the passing grade, an ordinary basic skill. Even if they updated 10,000 words a